“Pro-Life” is not a legitimate position.

I like to give my posts controversial headlines sometimes, mostly because I like to see who just replies on Facebook to the titles. I doubt by the end of this this will be quite as controversial as it seems like it might be.

The first thing about taking a position on something is that you are making the statement that there is an opposing view being held by some number of other people. For instance if I said I was “Anti-Baby Rape” I’m making the statement that somewhere out there there is a reasonably large group of people who are “for it. That’s a stupid thing to say, I highly doubt of the 7 billion people alive that there is a significant number of people taking the opposing view.

In the case of Pro-Life, or “Anti-Abortion”, you have to ask the question is there really a big group of people who are Anti-life, or “Pro-Abortion”? The obvious answer is no. This is a group of people who were entirely fabricated, a straw man army, if you will.

The amount of people who gleefully have abortions is small enough that there is no data for them, they only exist in the anecdotal commentary of ‘Pro-Life’ organizations. Whenever I see a group that is presenting an obvious façade as their belief I wonder what the actual central goal is.

For Pro-Life it isn’t all that difficult to find. The central supporters for defunding Planned Parenthood, are by-and-large also the same people who are against proper sexual education in school, against contraceptive distribution amongst sexually active populations. This results in a group of people who are ignorant of their chances of getting pregnant, removes their ability to lower their chances, and then makes it impossible to do anything but carry the child to term once they act out of ignorance.

It’s a remarkable scheme, the central theme to the entire game is control. Think I’m just talking out my butt? I wouldn’t blame you if you did. So allow the CDC to help me out here: One-Third Of Teen Mothers Didn’t Use Birth Control Because They Didn’t Think They Could Get Pregnant. The good news is that the internet exists, though there has been intense work done since its inception to hide information about sex from teens, anyone with half a functioning brain (read: basically everyone) can find anything they desire.

What delights me the most from this movement is that in states where abstinence only education is pushed you find a positive correlation with teen pregnancies. So either coincidentally these states have the most fertile youth, or the system doesn’t work. In interviews teens who believe in abstinence do not use contraceptives once they finally do decide to have sex. Why? They think contraceptives don’t work.

If Pro-Life was a legitimate movement it would be concerned with proper sexual education. Why? Because the US Ranks #1 in the world’s developed nations for teen pregnancy. We are one of the only places in the world teaching abstinence only, when you don’t create a disconnect between reality and education you don’t get left with the messy cleanup after. If a person truly wanted to stop abortions they would go to the source. Be proactive, not reactive, but being proactive would mean breaking down the system of control.

It’s perhaps not so much a pro-life movement as much as a fetish for life. An infatuation with birth and perhaps secondarily punishment in those deemed heretical. Having sex out of wedlock? You should be punished. It’s sort of a creepy retelling of Eve and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, with every single teenage female they can find. They say don’t touch the fruit, and set up the environment in such a way to leave Eve (the girl) enticed.

What truly makes me angry, what makes me dizzy with rage when I hear folks pushing this idea is that they trivialize the impact of abortion on a person. An abortion is an intense procedure, it leaves the woman biologically confused and emotionally torn for a long time. In my own youth I had a friend who was sexually active (not with me, mind you), she ended up having an abortion and I watched it change her.

She still smiled but not nearly as much, occasionally we’d talk and she’d ask me how I think the child would be now. What would the kid be doing today if it was still alive, and how her life would be different. I had over my teen years counseled a lot of people for various things, abuse, trauma, accidents, relationship troubles, but of all of them hers was the one that hit me the most.

It wasn’t like dropping a DVD off at Blockbuster, she had been separated from a part of her. Life has been chugging along for hundreds of millions of years, the desire to keep our young alive and to protect them has been ingrained for more generations and for more types of animals than any person can fathom. To think that suddenly in the last 100 years we have somehow overcome this extreme parental coding and can merrily dispense of a fetus is moronic.

Completely and totally moronic.

This sort of event should not be trivialized, it is a serious moment in a persons life and it does impact them deeply. Acting like its no harder than paper or plastic immediately sequesters a person into being illegitimate, totally unworthy of being heard.

So first I would suggest these groups gather some legitimacy by fighting as hard to feed these children as they do to defund planned parenthood. Once that mind-blowing hypocrisy is over, admit that there is no real movement for pro-abortions and that Planned Parenthood is about reducing unplanned pregnancy to its lowest possible level but ultimately having options for when the event occurs. The hardest step would be accepting that the morning-after pill is not abortion nor murder. Unfortunately this recalls a leap of logic that directly conflicts with the interpretation some folks have made about their own faiths.

Even if that cannot be accepted, you then move onto what any person legitimately concerned with life would do. You would maximize the likelihood that all pregnancies are planned and wanted. Fund for the most extensive sexual education teens can get, provide them with contraceptives and make sure the proper use for that is taught as well. It is important to also get over the whole “teens are having sex” thing. Most people reading this probably were, and judging by the amount of people on my Facebook who are parents of multiple kids already I’d be willing to bet my high school had quite a bit of boot knocking going on. (Perhaps just getting all kids into Magic Cards would keep pregnancies down, apparently all the mating went over my head while I was untapping my lands).

Once you have established a strong network of education for sex and how to do it as safely as possible you move onto support for the pregnancies that do arise. Assuming the most likely scenario for a couple you have about 5 in 100 couples looking at potential pregnancy (assuming no pill but using spermicide+condoms). If we can assume people put a legitimate effort into feeding those previously mentioned 17 million people (who are alive already, I might add), we should have a safety net now for supporting the pregnant women.

Get them the proper nutrition they need, then discuss support plans or adoption with them. We can hope that with a good education system that this sort of event is no longer stigmatized, so she’ll be able to finish school if she’s still in school without being looked at as some sort of categorical failure.

But we are assuming that the massive pro-life movement has also put in to get the children already up for Adoption into loving families. This would mean that newly born children would be quickly nabbed up and raised in a loving family. It costs about 13,000 dollars a year to take care of a child on the west coast. So once you have the total number of sexually active people, you can then take 5% of that number and multiply it by 13,000 to get the cost for a year of raising those kids.

Now in theory if you provided teens with outlets, such as adult entertainment you could reduce the amount of people having sex. Likewise if you remove the mysticism behind it it is likely to become less pervasive. Again we are rocking the teen pregnancy championship not because we are more fertile but because we aggressively try to make people ignorant in the matter while simultaneously making it difficult and embarrassing for them to protect themselves.

Why in heaven’s name would we do that?

Oh.

You can look at it from another angle also. It is utterly moronic to think that making abortions illegal would stop them, look at the drug war, or prohibition, or absolutely anything else. Making things illegal doesn’t make them go away. It just makes them slightly harder to see, and out of sight certainly does not mean gone.

If you take someone in a state of panic and don’t give them safe outlets for their issue you will leave them in a position to not only endanger the life they are creating but also the one they currently possess.

A big part of the problem is adults never growing up. I don’t mean in the conventional sense, keeping your childhood curiosities and desire to learn is a good thing, but the fetishizing of fantasy into adulthood does a considerable amount of harm. When looking at an issue like Abortion it should be approached sensibly and with a very broad mind.

I don’t think anybody wants abortions happening, it isn’t something that causes people to high five and breakdance to dubstep to. But if someone truly wanted to protect life, they would respect it at all stages. Part of respecting life is letting people make informed decisions. The keyword is informed. So the choice becomes somewhat binary, which is more important, forcing a view upon others or respecting their life?

Shame I just do these as a one off…I bet I could restructure these posts much nicer on a second or third draft.